Joe Morales: a tribute to a beloved dancer - the dance community of Portland, Oregon, fondly remembers a dancer and choreographer

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Martha Ullman West

They came in twos and threes and fours, fifty dancers down the ramp. Like the Shades in La Bayadere. Most of them were women, modern dancers, dressed in loose white costumes, some carrying broomsticks, horizontally, between them. Suspended on the broomsticks were empty jackets.

A tribute to those dancers who are living with AIDS as well as those who have died of it, Oregon choreographer Bonnie Merril's We Gathered was given two evening performances in the courtyard at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. It was part of an ongoing piece that Merrill, the only individual dance artist to win an Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts, had created for Artquake 1994, Portland's annual Labor Day weekend arts festival.

The coats were for Barry Bergman, Scott Bryant, and F. Charles Hubbard, dancers who had appeared in the piece in an earlier version and had since died.

And for Joe Morales, who had intended to dance at Artquake. He had lost his sight, however, and would lose his life as well, leaving behind a community of dancers who had come together to look after him at a time when they were suffering from terrible personal. and professional losses.

As it is doing all over the country, AIDS is laying waste to dancers in Portland. Of the ten men who danced in the premiere of Merrill's piece in January 1989, four have died. Other losses include Dennis Spaight, associate artistic director and resident choreographer of Oregon Ballet Theatre, in 1993. Nineteen ninety-four was an especially bad year: Portland Dance Theatre founding member F. Charles Hubbard died, and so did Oregon Ballet dancers Ronald Dargan and Joseph Brown, and Sylvester Dolinar, who danced with Portland Ballet (precursor of Oregon Ballet) and taught at the company's school. Dance itself has also been hit hard. In the last two years Portland's centers for modem and contemporary dance have closed. Budget cuts have also eliminated Portland State University's dance department where Morales, a native of New Mexico, had studied and performed in faculty shows after he first arrived in Portland in the late seventies.

Dancers Workshop, founded in 1979 by Reed College professor of dance Judith Massee, folded in November 1993. The workshop had been a center for adult dance students and a showcase for independent choreographers. The space in northwest Portland was, like PSU's Shattuck Studio Theatre, one of the best in town. Morales had taught and performed there from its inception.

In the midst of this devastation, the dancers who had worked with Morales and known him well during his seventeen years as a hardworking, gifted member of their community gathered to help him through his final illness. They donated their time, talent, and energy to give him both practical and spiritual support. And to dance.

The progress of his illness was fast. In April 1993 he told a few friends, including his roommates Robert Guitron, a dancer and actor, and Sara Anderson, a dancer and graphic designer, that he was ill. He did it with characteristic humor, cooking them a seven-course dinner and telling them not to cry. "Robert, you're going to have a whole new wardrobe, he said. "This papaya cost seven bucks. Now eat it!"

In July Morales was hospitalized and went into a coma. His chance of survival was 10 percent. The family was sent for and dancers sat for hours by his bed. Among them was Nancy Killough, who had met Morales when both were founding members of Keith Martin's Northwest Repertory Dance Company. (That company became Ballet Oregon and eventually in 1989 was consolidated with Pacific Ballet Theatre to become Oregon Ballet Theatre.) Morales survived but was told he would not be able to dance again.

"That didn't worry me," he said not long before he died. "I didn't think about it very much. I'm always dancing; they said I was pointing my toes when I was in a coma. Going blind changed my perspective; I knew I couldn't dance or choreograph. That was when I felt the loss for the first time. My body doesn't feel different; I was always faking extensions anyway! The loss of my eyesight was strange and quick, Busby Berkeley-like."

After Morales had been told by his doctors that he would soon be blind, Merrill and thirty-eight of the dancers in We Gathered staged a performance of the piece for an audience of Morales and his two caregivers. "I wondered how that would be for the dancers," Merrill says. "But you couldn't be sad around Joe because of his spirit and his humor. He sat on the edge of his chair and watched everyone intently. He was a wonderful audience."

Before Morales lost his vision completely, longtime friend and colleague Vin Marti ("We shared an ethnic background in a white man's world") danced a solo for Morales that he would later perform at his memorial service. Benny Bell, a former Northwest Repertory Dance Company colleague now based in Amsterdam, visited him with the baby girl he had just adopted; he had wanted Morales to see her.

By the end of August Morales was confined to his apartment in a warehouse district in southeast Portland, where artists of various kinds are beginning to settle. His roommates and his colleagues organized themselves to see him through until the end, whenever it came.